Pots and Pans to stop
the attack on Iran
Posted by Mark Davey
Wednesday, 14 February 2007
Here's a national protest plan to make noise with pots and pans for a few minutes a day to protest against wars, old and new. Other countries do this noise thing and it is quite contagious, a form of grass-roots viral marketing.
Published on Saturday, February 10, 2007 by CommonDreams.org Sounding the Alarm by Eric Herter
We need to wake our country to the extreme danger we’re in. We are being sleep-walked into a war with Iran that can have infinitely more grave consequences for us all than the war with Iraq.
We need to sound the alarm, to rouse those sleeping in the house where the fire is now crackling, so we can jump from bed and stop it before it gets out of control. The plan for waking the dozing household is below. .....
OK – so how do we do it?
Big peace demonstrations don’t work anymore. Civil disobedience is too big a step, too risky for more than a few of us, and won’t attract the millions of us who see the danger, but don’t know what to do.
So here it is, friends: pots and pans. Call a few like-minded friends and gather across the street from the post office at twelve noon Monday, Tuesday, each day this coming week. Bring pots and pans, and beat on them. No signs, no buttons, no funny clothes – we don’t want to be the stereotyped anti-war protestors everyone’s seen already, and that the press and public have learned to ignore. When people ask what we’re doing, we tell them we’re trying to prevent a war that will have catastrophic consequences for our way of life here in the US, kill millions of innocents elsewhere, and spread radiation around the world. We have an article or two (maybe something printed out from the links below) to hand to folks who are just rubbing the sleep from their eyes, but haven’t quite focused on what’s going on.
We make our noise for just five minutes. If the police come, we move on. This is not about confrontation, it’s about awakening. (The police have kids, they need food and electricity and a decent future, too. Deep in their hearts they, like us, know what’s going on. They, too, need to wake and act on what they know.)
If our busy schedules won’t let us gather at a public place, let’s rattle our trays in the cafeteria, bang our spatulas in the Burger King, tap the partition-walls of our office cubicles, clink our water-glasses in the Senate dining-room. Let’s step outside our front doors in the suburbs, open the windows of our apartments, step down from our truck cabs, open the windows of our cars in the mall parking lot, and bang our pots. Let’s tap our mikes if we’re radio DJs, tap our pulpits if we’re clergy. Let’s take our kids out front of the preschool and clap blocks together. Let’s toot our horns. Let’s rattle our jewelry. All together, at the same time. Let’s sound the alarm, five minutes each day at noon, to let the world know – to let each other know – that we’re here, we’re awake, and we intend to wake others to the danger we’re in.
If we’re asked to stop, let’s move somewhere else and keep sounding the alarm. If people yell at us, let’s smile back and keep tapping. We don’t want a fight, we want people to wake, to see how many of us there are, and to join us in waking others. It’s legal and a moral duty to sound the alarm if a fire is starting.
Let’s spread this idea around to our friends. Noon, Monday. And then the next day, at noon again. Just five minutes a day. Hopefully, each day there will be more noise, as more Americans wake and join us.
It will be in the news. It will be on the internet. People will be talking about it, looking up from their daily lives, looking at the likely consequences of this war, realizing that this is a very dangerous idea which affects us all. We may be able to stop it. But only if there are enough of us.
They may launch the attack anyway. This may push them into doing it more quickly than planned. But there’s a chance that a huge demonstration of public alarm may give Congress, as well as the cooler heads in the government and the military, the courage they need to pull us back from the edge of the cliff the Administration is leading us off.
We’re not lemmings.
Pots and pans, friends. Pots and pans!
Eric Herter was the AP Television producer in Vietnam in the mid-90s. He’s now a writer and video-producer in Brunswick, Maine
Posted by Jack Hughes
Wow, this prospect really will have the powers-that-be quaking in their boots. Who knows, it might even prove as effective as putting a "Not in my name" sticker in one's window was in preventing conflict in Iraq. Bourgeois liberal tokenism a-gogo.
Posted by Tim
Friday, 16 February 2007
Or prehaps we should just bomb Parliament instead.
Come on, doing any thing is better than doing nothing but whinging.